Marketing & GrowthFree
Email List Health and Deliverability Audit
The audit that segments on what receivers actually measure, and prices the suppression in list size and revenue before you run it.
River reads the send history the way a receiver does. Bounces by type, complaints by segment and by campaign, unsubscribes against sends, and the last time each address did something a machine could not have done for it. Out of that comes one row per segment with a call attached: keep, re-permission, sunset over the next four sends, or suppress today. Then the part that decides whether any of it happens: what each call costs in list size and in revenue.
Every list health template does the same thing. Sort by last open, draw a line at ninety days, delete everything below it. That rule removes the people whose mail client hides opens and keeps the security gateway loading images on nobody's behalf. It also arrives without a price tag, which is why it gets proposed every year and approved never. Nobody signs off on removing a third of the list when the only number attached to the proposal is a hunch.
Written for lifecycle marketers watching a delivery rate slide, ecommerce teams whose flows stopped earning, and anyone who inherited a list with an import in it nobody can explain. Pair it with an email performance consolidation when the send history has to be assembled first, and with the lifecycle email program pack when the fix is how often each person hears from you. It runs in the marketing workspace, beside the audit of every automated message leaving the same sending domain.
The number a receiver publishes, and the one it does not
Gmail publishes the threshold it actually enforces. Its sender guidelines say to keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.10 percent, and never to reach 0.30 percent or higher. The same page says something the entire list-hygiene genre ignores. Google does not track open rates, cannot verify open rates reported by third parties, and does not treat a low open rate as an indicator of a delivery problem. So the metric every template sunsets on is one the receiver never sees.
The unsubscribe path is mechanical and therefore checkable. RFC 8058 requires an HTTPS address in List-Unsubscribe, the exact string List-Unsubscribe=One-Click in List-Unsubscribe-Post, and a DKIM signature covering both of those header fields. It also forbids the endpoint returning an HTTPS redirect, and forbids the POST carrying cookies or authorization. Each of those is visible in the raw source of a message you already sent, and a platform reporting the headers as configured is not the same as the headers being correct.
Then the page the unsubscribe link lands on. Under the CAN-SPAM rule, a sender may not require a recipient to pay a fee, to provide anything beyond their address and opt-out preferences, or to take any step beyond visiting a single web page. A preference centre that asks for a reason first, or asks the recipient to log in, is outside that. It is also the quickest way to turn an unsubscribe into a spam complaint, which is the number deciding where the next send goes.
How it works
Bring the send history
Bounces, complaints, unsubscribes and engagement, in whatever shape your platform's export happens to produce.
River sizes the segments
Each cohort measured by what it costs you, rather than by when it last opened.
Price the suppression
See the list size, send volume and revenue each call removes before approving any.
Run the sunset
Work the schedule across four sends, then recheck the spam rate a month later.
What you get
- Every segment sized, with the share of complaints and hard bounces it actually produces
- A keep, re-permission, sunset or suppress call per segment, with the reason attached
- The volume and revenue each suppression costs, worked out before anybody approves it
- Bounce codes read by type, so a full mailbox is never treated as a dead address
- The unsubscribe headers on a message you really sent, checked against the specification
- A sunset schedule across the next four sends rather than one deletion nobody sanctions
Common questions
We only have opens, not per-contact clicks. Can you still do this?
Yes, and the audit says so on its face rather than pretending otherwise. Bounce type, complaint concentration, acquisition cohort, domain mix and time since signup carry most of the work. Where clicks are genuinely unavailable, the segments are drawn on those, and the sheet names click export as the single highest-value thing to fix.
How much of the list will I end up cutting?
Whatever the evidence supports, which is usually a good deal less than the conventional rules propose and concentrated in places you did not expect. A single bad import, role addresses and repeat hard bounces frequently account for most of the complaint volume while making up under fifteen percent of the file.
Will suppressing addresses cost us revenue?
You will know before you decide, because the number is on the sheet next to every call. Addresses that have not clicked or bought in two years and generate complaints at forty times the list average almost never carry meaningful revenue, and the audit shows the exact figure rather than asking you to accept that.
What do you do with soft bounces?
Read them by code rather than lumping them together. A full mailbox, a greylisting deferral and a policy rejection mean three different things, and only the last one indicates a reputation problem. An address soft bouncing for a week is not dead, and treating it as dead throws away deliverable customers along with the noise.
Do I need Postmaster Tools set up first?
The audit runs without it and is sharper with it, because the spam rate reported there is the number the receiver actually acts on. If it is not connected, that goes at the top of the findings, since you are otherwise guessing at the one metric with a published threshold attached to it.
How often should we run this?
Once properly, then quarterly, then before every seasonal peak. Deliverability erodes rather than breaks, so the useful cadence is one that catches a complaint rate drifting from 0.06 to 0.14 percent while it is still cheap. The audit writes the recheck date into the sunset plan itself.
Email List Health and Deliverability Audit
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